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BitVulture writes "Richard Stallman took time to air his views on the crypto-currency that has become virtually as valuable as gold. In an interview with Russian media giant RT, Stallman praised Bitcoin for allowing people to 'send money to someone without getting the permission of a payment company'. But he also warned against a major weakness of Bitcoin and called for the development of 'a system for truly anonymous payment' online."

Zerocoin is an *extension* to Bitcoin - if it is accepted as part of Bitcoin then it will be part of Bitcoin. Because it has been developed as a library (and documented) altcoins can use it too. TLDR: it doesn't matter which coin comes out on top because they can all use it.

The size Bitcoin blockchain is quite problematic. The size is huge. What is really needed is a system where coins outside of circulation lose value so that the length of the blockchain can be easily kept to a manageable size because lost coins will disappear and the amount of history you have to keep (and verify) will be much smaller.

I think the emunie project had an interesting approach to making verification quick and efficient but I can't remember the specifics.

That makes some sense to me, but conflicts with some of the original gold-esque ideology of Bitcoin, of wanting to be an indefinite store of value in which depreciation (in the monetary sense) is impossible.

Depreciation isn't really the right word. You can keep value indefinitely - as long as you move the money periodically. You don't have to actually spend it.
Perhaps you could mark some addresses as being "storage" addresses so that people can keep cold wallets without worrying... But that runs the danger of being confusing or people just marking every address and cold storage (perhaps increased transaction fees could discourage this).

Yes the size of the blockchain is fast becoming a problem, especially now that enthusiasm about Bitcoins is growing much faster than the technological means to store the blockchain. Also, the size of every block is going to grow explosively as soon as online services everywhere start accepting bitcoins as payment option, and THAt will be much more problematic.

But then, it'll just drive some more division of labor, with people storing the blockchain and verifying transactions getting paid for the service, much like what is happening now in the mining part. There will definitely be growing pains and I can foresee a near-term future where transactions get a LONG time to validate because miners are swamped with transaction volume.

As for your suggestion, it cannot apply to Bitcoin in any way or shape. Reducing the size of the blockchain means making a "summary" of it where all the wallets that are now zero get short-circuited in the transaction history. i.e 'wallet A sends 1 BTC to wallet B which then sends it to wallet C', you shorten it as 'Wallet A sends 1 BTC to wallet C'. But that eschews the hashing process entirely, so it cannot be done trustfully AFAIK.

It's orthogonal. The Ponzi aspect is due to the mining reward structure in the early days. That, and the current volatility, which makes it much easier to classify BitCoin as not being (a good form of) money. This is relevant because (as noted by the thread starter) there are other digital currencies that do not have the same bootstrapping problem that BitCoin faced.

your question is pretty unrelated. BTC are as much a ponzi scheme as fancy diamonds or gold is a ponzi scheme. when you buy them, you are doing it right now with the explicit expectation that you can/will find someone else to buy it from you for a greater amount.

BTC, at the very least, can already be used as a currency in transactions, but the amount it is being used for transactions is so small it's pretty irrelevant.

Just like gold or diamonds, the value could collapse if people decide it's not worth the

The central banks controlling real currencies can to some degree manage the value of that currency, for example by adjusting interest rates or the money supply. On top of that there is a massive number of people who use the currency on a daily basis to buy and sell stuff, which lends stability to the value as well. The problem with Bitcoin is that it's all speculation now; the people who use the currency for other purposes is negligible. Once the ratio of use vs. speculation improves, and the demand is s

Zerocoin is an extension to Bitcoin. It has been implemented in some altcoin(s) already IIRC.

I'm not too keen on the detais, but if I remember correctly you had to explicitly specify that you wanted to "hide" a transaction when making a zero-coin transaction. That and I think the "hidden" transactions incurred quite a computational and storage cost on the blockchain.

So RMS wants the same thing as everyone else in the Crypto-Currency community. Good for him (If only he would contribute something other than a desire...). I only know of one design that gives both anonymity and decentralization, and thats ZeroCoin [zerocoin.org] which has major performance problems (it is not currently scaleable in any practical sense). In my opinion bitcoin does not scale well either, but at least it scales drastically further than ZeroCoin.

Reminds me of how RMS wants Emacs to become WYSIWG [gnu.org], but seems opposed to using existing solutions, or implementing it himself, or actually making a feature list or design for it himself. RMS is good at taking positions on issues, and does a good job representing his particular viewpoint, but I wouldn't expect much more out of him.

Chaum is another weirdy beardy, and so paranoid that he makes RMS look like a beacon of sanity.We need more stable people in the geek community. Stable people with people skills who can code like gods.We need to up our game.

Bitcoin worked (works) because it's not anonymous. Fundamentally, if you have dirty coin, you need someone with clean coins to help you. There's no reason people with clean coins should help you.

The zerocoin proposal is akin to an agreement that everyone should trade their bikes one for one upon request. Sure, that'd be great for bike thieves - that hot bike you just stole you can just trade for some else's clean bike!

Would that work? Sure, it would work. It would make bikes anonymous, and overcome the problem that they are identifiable (with serial numbers, colors, etc.). The question is what the hell would be in in for legitimate bike owners?

Stallman should accept that sharing and modifying software is one thing, sharing and modifying information that is used as a token of agreement (passwords, signatures, contracts, licenses, "written by Richard Stallman" notices etc.) quite another.

Transfer of property claims are not a private matter - not if you want everyone else to respect those property claims.

From a practical perspective, anonymous payment would legalise corruption, legalise money laundering (to the disadvantage of everyone having more money in the legitimate economy than in the criminal one), and legalise tax evasion. You got to be a pretty kooky libertarian type to think that's a good idea.

Would that work? Sure, it would work. It would make bikes anonymous, and overcome the problem that they are identifiable (with serial numbers, colors, etc.). The question is what the hell would be in in for legitimate bike owners?

There is a difference between short-term and long-term benefits. In the short term, there is no benefit for someone "swapping bikes". In the case of digital currency, there is no short-term benefit for swapping coins, but there is no loss either.

In the long term however, having anonymous currency removes opportunities for oppression and corruption in government, manipulation and injustice. The bike-swappers enjoy a stronger, more robust government which has less opportunity to screw with their lives.

"In the case of digital currency, there is no short-term benefit for swapping coins, but there is no loss either."

Are you kidding? There's a major loss; making theft virtually untraceable and thus making theft considerably more attractive. Now even the not-so-clever criminals in western easy-to-reach-by-the-law countries can get in on the online theft game. Not just those that are good at hiding their tracks or are in countries that won't cooperate with your own country's police.

If someone steals your digital coins, they may end up virtually (ha!) anywhere, with little or no chance of ever find them again.

This is what we had with a cash-only economy, except much, much worse, since the thieves don't have to be physically close to you or your money. For most people, moving away from a cash-only economy has had the great benefit that their accumulated wealth is much better protected.

Potentially safer for non-criminals though. At the moment if you accept BTC it is hard to know where it came from and if it was stolen. Being decentralized there isn't a central point where lists of allegedly stolen Bitcoins are kept. The "allegedly" part is important too because for coins to be declared legally stolen there has to be some kind of legal process, and it would only apply in certain jurisdictions, and may not be recognized by everyone.

If someone steals your digital coins, they may end up virtually (ha!) anywhere, with little or no chance of ever find them again.

Yes. That's the way cash works. It's a consequence of anonymity. The answer to it is, don't leave your cash where it can get stolen. If your system doesn't allow for unattended tokens to be stolen, don't call it digital cash.

Bitcoin is the most useless thing ever. It's not as good as cash for anonymity, not as good as credit cards for acceptance. It's the dot-com stock of the 20

To add to that, you might already know the stats about % of notes with traces of cocaine in them. I dont see it bothering people. Well they never know if the cash they have is dirty or clean. The same applies here, they dont know if the coins they have are dirty or clean, they just see at as any other physical coin.

But cash is hard to automate. Washing $100 you stole from someone's wallet clean is easy, you just go shopping. But washing $1 mio. you picked up in a drug deal or bank robbery isn't that easy anymore.

Same thing in Europe. Even the same limit - withdraw or deposit above 10k âuros and you are in for a bit of paperwork. It's not a big hassle, more of an inconvenience, so I'm not singing the "evil government nazi control freaks" song because I realize that the opposite of control is not only freedom, but also anarchy, crime and (after a while) tyranny.

(and before anyone trolls, of course that doesn't mean I'm all for total control. Part of growing up is understanding that the real world is complex, has

The same applies for cash, but people dont hesitate to use it. They dont really see it as clean cash and dirty cash. Cash is cash.

Yup. There needs to remain a way for people to use cash, without letting a single "dirty" transaction taint the whole (block)chain of transactions.

This is why I have a problem with money laundering laws -- it's not the money's fault if it's being used for something illegal. Money laundering laws are like monitoring everyone's Internet traffic for the off chance that something illegal takes place online, surely we'd never do anything like that...

Basically anonymous money allows digital currency to sink tax havens. So on the one hand both anonymous money and tank will have the same core function servicing criminal activity, on the other hand when digital currency is attacked, third party persons tend not to suffer as all those people who live in tax havens but are not directly or indirectly involved in financial services to facilitate crime.

The only acceptable 'Anonymous' money is free labour, for example those who already donate their efforts to

So RMS wants the same thing as everyone else in the Crypto-Currency community. Good for him (If only he would contribute something other than a desire...)....Reminds me of how RMS wants Emacs to become WYSIWG [gnu.org], but seems opposed to using existing solutions, or implementing it himself, or actually making a feature list or design for it himself.

Maybe you missed that whole GNU project thing. He contributed so much he can barely type without a special low pressure keyboard anymore because his hands are ruined from all the contributing ungrateful fucks like you ignore. Now he contributes the best way he can via public awareness, speeches, etc. When he's dead I bet you'll be bitching about how his corpse doesn't even advocate for free software anymore.

When I was a teen I only new a little ASM and some BASIC. I wanted to make games with smooth scrolling graphics, but BASIC was too slow. I complained on local a BBS's BASIC board about the predicament and the sarcastic response was, "If BASIC is too slow, make your own damn language." So, with only a rudimentary knowledge of x86 assembly, and not a single programming lesson, I did just that. I had wasted months of fighting to increase performance of my BASIC program: It only took a couple of weeks to make an interpretor and then a simple compiler for my language and it faster than BASIC (didn't need a runtime.exe either). It had just never occurred to me that I could make my own programming language -- or anything wholly in ASM for that matter. My sarcastic friend was impressed and surprised that I had heeded his bad advice, and we both sold software on Compuserve built with my language for years afterwards, no expensive C compiler / license required. The point is that making a suggestion, or getting the idea out there is sometimes all it takes to cause something to spring into existence.

RMS is good at taking positions on issues, and does a good job representing his particular viewpoint, but I wouldn't expect much more out of him.

So, he's good at what he does, and though he doesn't claim to do the grunt work of implementing or designing stuff anymore, we shouldn't expect him to? Gotcha. Additionally: You're essentially in agreement with RMS if you think that we need a workable anonymous crypto currency -- You essentially said so yourself by mentioning that Zerocoin has performance problems. Hey, maybe a protocol that was built for anonymity from the ground up wouldn't suffer such performance problems? His advice when re-implementing a UNIX tool is to aim for different goals. If theirs is fast, aim for less memory consumption instead; If theirs is processor intensive, aim for stability instead; or vise versa -- This way the implementations will be very different even if they serve the same ends. In other words, what RMS and I know is that just because Zerocoin or BASIC exists doesn't mean there's only one way to skin the cat.

Bitcoin has been around for quite a while, and nothing special seemed to be happening with it. Then along came the Wikileaks release of information that genuinely infuriated the United States. All of a sudden, PayPal, several imitators and all the major credit card companies decided not to process donations to the organization.

Time passes, and people who might not want the United States to have final say over their financial arrangements were just starting to move lazily toward some form of anonymous money transfer.

Then the Snowden situation arose, and those people got their noses rubbed in the fact that the kind of spying and control they were worried about in a vague way was on-going, comprehensive, and aimed at everybody from heads of state to some granny who attended an Occupy demonstration.

So they got the message: We need a way to move money anonymously, and we need it right this minute.

Governments not only back money, they also want to control it. For good reason (at least good from their point of view). At the very least they want to control its flow. Money is a tool for control, maybe the easiest. You can incite people, you can convince people, you can inspire people to do your bidding, but the easiest way to make them do it is money. Given enough of it, you will almost certainly find enough people to do what you want to happen.

Now, if you not only control who you can give money, but who anyone else can give money, control is yours. Not only can you make people do your bidding, you can deny others the same.

Something else to keep in mind, not all of that control is malevolent. One of the historical problems with unregulated economic systems is they tend to be notoriously unstable and have even worse class divides then we have today. People often look back on those times and talk about how great they were, but for the most part only the wealthy and the impact the system had on them makes it into the popular mythology. So while we might feel iffy about some 3rd party being in charge of our fates like that,

We need a way to move money anonymously, and we need it right this minute.

1. Cash
2. Barter
3. Disposable credit cards purchased with cash

But what about Bitcoin? It allows you to stow away massive amounts of money in an untouchable way... kind of nice but it's not without its problems. Is it in society's interest that people can move huge amounts of money without them or the government knowing? It can be very much to our detriment, such as being unable to stem the proceeds of crime that flow out of a country into another, unable to check the movement of money by foreign government sponsored subversion, and so forth. I know that nobody has been realistically able to stop the illegal transportation of gold, but why should we make the task of money laundering easier than before?

You go up to the counter in a minimart, hand over cash, get a ticket with a number on it, sort of like an account number I guess. You can then spend that online till you are out of money providing of course that the site accepts UKash. https://www.ukash.com/en-GB/whats-ukash/ [ukash.com]

I don't know if there is anything like that in the US, but it comes close to anonymous... of course there's the security video footage at the store

oops, I meant to replace the first link with the second link, not double up. Anyway, the first link is more marketingish, the second link is a little more informative about the process, although what I said above basically outlines it.

A good example is wikileaks itself. In order to receive donations, it needs to have a public address. They have, and it's completely transparent - we can see exactly how much Wikileaks has received at that address: 3,795.80380943 bitcoins. They have a balance on it of 1,111.97135027 bitcoins, or roughly a million dollars at today's prices.

Think about it. There's no economy that's more transparent to the public than the bitcoin economy. And that's a good thing. In the conventional economy, banks, credit card companies and governments can see more than we can see in the block chain, but it's completely hidden for us.

Stop trying to fight or deny the transparency of bitcoin. It's a strength, not a weakness. Governments could have effectively stopped bitcoin payments to wikileaks too, by making it a crime to give or receive money from wikileaks. Since everything is so transparent, that would have been really effective. But it would also be bare-faced tyranny. It's much more convenient for them to be able to suppress wikileaks by having private companies make the decision to not offer service, officially on their own.

Bitcoin has been around for quite a while, and nothing special seemed to be happening with it. Then along came the Wikileaks release of information that genuinely infuriated the United States. All of a sudden, PayPal, several imitators and all the major credit card companies decided not to process donations to the organization.

Time passes, and people who might not want the United States to have final say over their financial arrangements were just starting to move lazily toward some form of anonymous money transfer.

Then the Snowden situation arose, and those people got their noses rubbed in the fact that the kind of spying and control they were worried about in a vague way was on-going, comprehensive, and aimed at everybody from heads of state to some granny who attended an Occupy demonstration.

So they got the message: We need a way to move money anonymously, and we need it right this minute.

Enter Bitcoin. (dramatic music)

In addition, there was Cyprus, where the banks were threating to take a bunch of people's money.

It already exists, it's called bank note and coins, especially the US Dollars. Why try to re-invent the wheel ?
It is the main way to exchange goods anonymously in the whole world. As long as enough people believe in and trust its value, it will continue to run. While some anarchist might argue that there is no place for a state controlled money, this argument is not really valid here. That argument has more to do with the fact that too much rely on it. What we are trying to assert here is the level of anonymity of the currency.

The problem is to create an anonymous currency, not whether or not it is online or IRL. That being said, there will be no anonymous online currency without online anonymity, something that nobody (ie. neither tech companies or government) wants in these time of erosion of public liberties.

This is about an anonymous virtual currency, though. At the moment, as far as I'm aware, it's impossible to 100% anonymously send money online.
As for using bank notes and coins, that's obviously not an option online and not all transactions nowadays can be done in-person cash-in-hand.

I tried to use it to pay online, but my business partner complained the bills I faxed ain't legal tender.

This is a good point. Credit card companies and banks use promisory notes (credit) and we trust them that the electronic transactions become real at the other end.

The problem with Bitcoin is it is a floating currency and it is prone to price fluctuation that means its meaningfulness as a means of monetary exchange is currently dwarfed by its speculative importance.

And consider this also: Bitcoin mining depends on processing power. Who has most of that? The very people no one trusts anymore (finally!). Money does not just have to be based on a finite resource, but an honest resource. It needs to be off the grid, independent of power companies (no power, no electricity to do your Bitcoin transactions!), telco's (no internet, no Bitcoin). To store value I would still favor metals, and for day to day anonymous purchasing there are better ways.

You can also mail it through the postal service. Works okay for modest amounts in the first world, and is not that uncommon. Just conceal the money a bit so someone can't see it through the envelope, and as long as you're not in the kind of country where the postman routinely steals mail, it'll arrive fine.

"But then criminals will have a way to transfer money completely anonymously, too"

Newsflash: They already do. Their "problem" is just that it's costly. They need to employ quite a few mules and split the money. That's fine and dandy if you're getting money from blackmail where it doesn't matter whether you get 90% or 70% of the illegal assets you squeeze out of your patsy, less so if you are trying to run a legitimate business.

What? Oh, why someone would like to buy anonymously even if it's legit what he buys? Well, maybe because he doesn't want anyone to know that he's buying porn or (legal) drugs, that he buys information certain entities do not want him to have. There's plenty of stuff that is perfectly legal to buy, sell and possess, but embarrassing.

What? Oh, why someone would like to buy anonymously even if it's legit what he buys? Well, maybe because he doesn't want anyone to know that he's buying porn or (legal) drugs, that he buys information certain entities do not want him to have. There's plenty of stuff that is perfectly legal to buy, sell and possess, but embarrassing.

There's also plenty of stuff that is perfectly illegal to buy, sell and possess, and some for very good reasons. For the embarrassing stuff, complete anonymity doesn't help you hiding stuff from your wife, because she still sees money disappearing from bank accounts and you have to explain that. If she doesn't notice that, then your bank will sell you a credit-card like thing where you have to pay in money and then can use it without anyone else knowing.

No system can guarantee anonymity. Bitcoin transactions are completely traceable. On contrast, DigiCash transactions were completely untraceable. However, neither of these statements tells us about how much anonymity one can achieve using them.

When you buy Bitcoin from a company by identifying yourself to them, and then directly transfer the money to, say, a publicly known donation address of Wikileaks, you surely are perfectly identifiable. However, anything slightly more complicated than this quickly becomes impractical to analyze. Even with a considerable amount of data, scientists who claim they can trace identities screw up:

Sure, they can use the system to try to gather some statistics about usage or try to infiltrate Bitcoin services to accumulate as much personal data as possible, but it's quite easy to fool these systems and people who have something to worry about can figure these out easily.

Let's begin seeing Bitcoin for what it is: A distributed decentralized notarization system. That's all there is to it. You can build all sorts of features on top of this. There are already implemented anonymization solutions, both third party and protocol-level, that work on top of Bitcoin. Or, maybe, what you want is some payment system that supports chargebacks? Sure, that is easy to implement on top of an irreversible payment system; Bitcoin supports different signature schemes at the protocol level. Maybe you don't need a payment system, but want to notarize a document? Sure, you can even use the blockchain to copyright your work. So an and so forth.

Pretty sure that however many electrons it takes to encode it, Bitcoin's price by mass is a few orders of magnitude more than gold.

Of course, 1 BTC is roughly 9E-8 of the overall supply (4.8E-9 of the theoretical cap); one ounce of gold is about 1.81E-10 (assuming 171,300 tons of gold in total). As a fraction of world supply, that makes gold still about 1000 times more valuable than BTC.

As long as any government or criminal has the will and resources to break a security system, it will. This is a 100% certainty. Obfuscation, encryption, and ambiguity merely annoy and inconvenience the bastards. Nothing will stop them except political and/or law enforcement action. Attempts at technical solutions are just bumps in the yellow brick road.

Given the above, we should be skeptical (OK, cynical) enough to see proposals and products that pretend to solve the problem as just marketing crappola. Somebody is trying to sell something. In this case. RMS is proposing a hurricane-proof fart catcher. Good luck with that.

Do you reckon that police detectives look at crime scenes, sigh, and say that laws will never work to change behavior - there'll always be crime - and the only real solution is a technical one to make the crime impossible in the first place.

And tech-savy Slashdot readers look at technical measures, sigh, and say that technical measures will never work to change behavior - there'll always be hackers - and the only real solution is a legal one.

A lot of the comments here refer to either bip 32 [bitcoin.it] or ZeroCoin [zerocoin.org], with their supporters giving each as a solution to bitcoin anonymity. Can anyone describe the differences for the non-cryptographer?

Services like The Silk Road basically anonymized payments. The site ran a "tumbler" where incoming and outgoing payments were separated. Presumably the site also multiple wallets so incomings went in one wallet and outgoings from another. The wallets could be balanced out with random transactions between them. So anyone tracing it out would have a seriously hard time and could only make weak inferences.

I assume anyone could run such a service although it would be predominantly used for money laundering and therefore instantly attract the attention of law enforcement. Zero coin sounds like pretty much the same idea but in a more distributed way, to allow people to exchange money for a token and then redeem that token later, separating the transaction chain.

There are several tumblers existing for exactly this purpose. See for example: http://bitcoinfog.com/ [bitcoinfog.com]
I do not know whether or not they did indeed attract the attention of law enforcement, but since they are running as a tor hidden service and such a tumbler is pretty easy to code/deploy (meaning any such service taken down would be pretty assuredly replaced by 10 others the next day), it is unlikely LE could do anything about it.

The Silk Road was running in Tor as well and it got taken down. It just depends how high profile the service is and how badly the cops want to shut it down - a cost benefit thing. So if a service was laundering millions of bitcoins then the cops are sure as hell going to run an investigation on it. Also if I were a cop or an intelligence agency, I would be setting up some laundering services of my own. Perhaps some of these services running right now are sting operations.

eMunie [emunie.com] looks like a good alternative to Bitcoin. It does not only give a solution to the anonymity issue, but solves a number of other issues with Bitcoin, like the huge block chain size, the long time before a transaction is confirmed and waste of electricity through mining. The start of the production network is expected for the end of January. I'm really looking forward to see if it can hold up to all its promises, but the developer is a really capable and motivated guy (he was the owner of the company t

It looks interesting, and seems to solve some of my concerns about Bitcoin including some of the poison pills that Satoshi introduced into the protocol (and are now extremely hard to remove precisely because Satoshi put them in). I could go into some details, but the main gist is that Satoshi (whoever that might have been or still is if he ever decides to be active again) had a vision about Bitcoin and didn't like others messing with that vision. Once substantial and valid criticisms of his work started t

In many countries, it's illegal to make paper money transactions over a certain amount of money.

In other countries; the US included -- it is illegal to make paper money transactions over a certain amount: without filing a Cash Transaction Report (CTR), or under other conditions (e.g. A transaction $0.01 less than the reporting threshold; or multiple transactions suspected to be a structured transfer), a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR), with the feds.

No personal, or business transaction (no matter if invoiced or not, no matter if you are doing transaction with the State itself) in paper money over 999 euro is allowed, and if you own a no profit the limit IIRC is 516 euro. It is possible to deposit whatever amount to banks and let them do the transaction.Officially to combat crime and fiscal evasion.

Electronic money is more anonymous faster and more dangerous than paper money, once those handling it are powerful enough to trade internationally. Nothing has been done on that front. Therefore I guess the measure was to benefit the banking system in the short term, and the effects till now seems to confirm it. Those who could have been hampered by tracing have enough resources to resort to middlemen, obviously.

That is Italy-specific, within the legal framework of the ( much-needed ) fight against the mafia and camorra.

This is the problem with most suggestions that come from RMS. He espouses unrestricted freedom for all, but unfortunately when it comes to things involving financial transactions there are highly organised criminals who will exploit this freedom to make the job of law or tax enforcement almost impossible.

If someone does end up creating a truly anonymous form of currency or payment then you can be damn sure the main people who will benefit are those who want to pay no taxes or those who want to sell services

That is one of the classic tradeoffs when it comes to freedom. There are all sorts of activities that people both want for personal freedom but are also used by bad people to do, well, bad things. Sometimes it makes sense for the general population to have a freedom restricted in order to make it more difficult for a minority to use that same freedom to hurt people. Other times it doesn't.. and while people will often site extreme examples one way or the other, usually it is a non-trivial trade off.

What I find sad is how many people fight the middle grounds, attempts to find a balance between people keeping their general freedom while still trying to do something to reign in the bad actors. Much of the debate around CTRs is like that, something that disproportionately makes things more difficult for criminals but people still fight it on philosophical personal freedom grounds.

This is the problem with most suggestions that come from RMS. He espouses unrestricted freedom for all, but unfortunately when it comes to things involving financial transactions there are highly organised criminals who will exploit this freedom to make the job of law or tax enforcement almost impossible.

It's certainly not a new idea to suggest that the government should take away people's freedoms in exchange for safety, but almost every single time, I still find myself disgusted when I see such things brought up.

Cash transactions and deposits attract immediate suspicion. Even withdrawing an amount in cash is restricted in most countries.

Officially this is to crack down on crime and money laundering, but unofficially this is so that it is less likely there will be runs on banks and because electronic transactions are much easier to track.

Mostly for practical reasons. Banks don't like keeping enough cash on hand all the time for customers to make large withdrawals, so they put a reasonable limit on what each customer can withdraw in a day. You can usually get more with advance notice.

In other countries such as Germany there is no direct limit on the cash amount, but if you pay more than 10000 Euro in cash you need to be able to present proof where the money came from, or otherwise you may be arrested for money laundering. Besides, who will accept so much cash if he's not allowed to put it on a bank account afterwards?

In the UK, and probably across the EU, it is not illegal, but there are laws that make it practically impossible.

Over a threshold (10k GBP, 15k euros I think), there are additional reporting and documentation requirements for cash transactions. It's enough hassle, and risk, for the recipient that you will struggle to find anyone (legitimate) that will take that much in cash. You could insist that you think it's your legal right to pay that way, but then you risk them calling the police who will simply confiscate the cash, because anything over the same limits they can assume is "proceeds of crime". Sure, you can go to court and try and get it back, and some have succeeded, makes your lawyer a lot richer though, and is not exactly anonymous...

In theory, you can still carry cash, and make transactions, over the threshold level, but in practice you risk being considered a criminal for doing it, and effectively you cannot do it anonymously [which was the aim of the laws].

In the Netherlands, a man was recently controlled by police ( routine identity control, the police need not even give a reason for the control, but that is another chapter of the nascent-police-state discussion ). He carried € 30,000 in a plastic bag with him, and could not provide immediate proof for the money's origin. He was arrested. Only after a couple of day, when nobody could prove the money's illegal origin, he was released. Without the money, which remained at the police precincts. Injustice ? Yes. Police state ? Yes. But this anecdote adds another bit of momentum to Stallman's plea.

In the UK, and probably across the EU, it is not illegal, but there are laws that make it practically impossible.

I always like the quote from Mario Balotelli (an italian professional footballer earning millions) who was stopped by the police in the UK who asked him why he had £5,000 on him in cash. He answered: "Because I am rich!".

It is actually quite easy to do, and RMS has been talking about it for a while, this recent article mentions it in passing [wired.com] and links to something a more detailed reference [wired.com]. Think of those VISA debt gift cards that you can buy today. If you are allowed to pay cash for them without showing ID, then they are truly anonymous (unlike bitcoin), and can be used both online and in person. The systems he has in mind are basically refined versions of that basic concept.